Over a century ago Washington laid the corner-stone of the Capitol in what was
then little more than a tract of wooded wilderness here beside the Potomac. We
now find it necessary to provide great additional buildings for the business of
the government. This growth in the need for the housing of the government is but
a proof and example of the way in which the nation has grown and the sphere of
action of the National Government has grown. We now administer the affairs of a
nation in which the extraordinary growth of population has been outstripped by
the growth of wealth and the growth in complex interests.
The material problems that face us to-day are not such as they were in
Washington's time, but the underlying facts of human nature are the same now as
they were then. Under altered external form we war with the same tendencies
toward evil that were evident in Washington's time, and are helped by the same
tendencies for good.
It is about some of these that I wish to say a word to-day. In Bunyan's
"Pilgrim's Progress" you may recall the description of the Man with the
Muck-rake, the man who could look no way but downward, with the muck-rake in his
hand; who was offered a celestial crown for his muck-rake, but who would neither
look up nor regard the crown he was offered, but continued to rake to himself
the filth of the floor.
In "Pilgrim's Progress" the Man with the Muck-rake is set forth as the example
of him whose vision is fixed on carnal instead of on spiritual things. Yet he
also typifies the man who in this life consistently refuses to see aught that is
lofty, and fixes his eyes with solemn intentness only on that which is vile and
debasing. Now, it is very necessary that we should not flinch from seeing what
is vile and debasing. There is filth on the floor and it must be scraped up with
the muck-rake; and there are times and places where this service is the most
needed of all the services that can be performed. But the man who never does
anything else, who never thinks or speaks or writes, save of his feats with the
muck-rake, speedily becomes, not a help to society, not an incitement to good,
but one of the most potent forces for evil.
There are, in the body politic, economic and social, many and grave evils, and
there is urgent necessity for the sternest war upon them. There should be
relentless exposure of and attack upon every evil man whether politician or
business man, every evil practice, whether in politics, in business, or in
social life. I hail as a benefactor every writer or speaker, every man who, on
the platform, or in book, magazine, or newspaper, with merciless severity makes
such attack, provided always that he in his turn remembers that the attack is of
use only if it is absolutely truthful. The liar is no whit better than the
thief, and if his mendacity takes the form of slander, he may be worse than most
thieves. It puts a premium upon knavery untruthfully to attack an honest man,
or even with hysterical exaggeration to assail a bad man with untruth. An
epidemic of indiscriminate assault upon character does not good, but very great
harm. The soul of every scoundrel is gladdened whenever an honest man is
assailed, or even when a scoundrel is untruthfully assailed.
Now, it is easy to twist out of shape what I have just said, easy to affect to
misunderstand it, and, if it is slurred over in repetition, not difficult really
to misunderstand it. Some persons are sincerely incapable of understanding that
to denounce mud-slinging does not mean the endorsement of whitewashing; and both
the interested individuals who need whitewashing, and those others who practice
mud-slinging, like to encourage such confusion of ideas. One of the chief counts
against those who make indiscriminate assault upon men in business or men in
public life, is that they invite a reaction which is sure to tell powerfully in
favor of the unscrupulous scoundrel who really ought to be attacked, who ought
to be exposed, who ought, if possible, to be put in the penitentiary. If
Aristides is praised overmuch as just, people get tired of hearing it; and
overcensure of the unjust finally and from similar reasons results in their
favor.
Any excess is almost sure to invite a reaction; and, unfortunately, the
reaction, instead of taking the form of punishment of those guilty of the
excess, is very apt to take the form either of punishment of the unoffending or
of giving immunity, and even strength, to offenders. The effort to make
financial or political profit out of the destruction of character can only
result in public calamity. Gross and reckless assaults on character, whether on
the stump or in newspaper, magazine, or book, create a morbid and vicious public
sentiment, and at the same time act as a profound deterrent to able men of
normal sensitiveness and tend to prevent them from entering the public service
at any price.
As an instance in point, I may mention that one serious difficulty encountered
in getting the right type of men to dig the Panama Canal is the certainty that
they will be exposed, both without, and, I am sorry to say, sometimes within,
Congress, to utterly reckless assaults on their character and capacity.
At the risk of repetition let me say again that my plea is, not for immunity to
but for the most unsparing exposure of the politician who betrays his trust, of
the big business man who makes or spends his fortune in illegitimate or corrupt
ways. There should be a resolute effort to hunt every such man out of the
position he has disgraced. Expose the crime, and hunt down the criminal; but
remember that even in the case of crime, if it is attacked in sensational,
lurid, and untruthful fashion, the attack may do more damage to the public mind
than the crime itself. It is because I feel that there should be no rest in the
endless war against the forces of evil that I ask that the war be conducted with
sanity as well as with resolution.
The men with the muck-rakes are often indispensable to the well-being of
society; but only if they know when to stop raking the muck, and to look upward
to the celestial crown above them, to the crown of worthy endeavor.
There are beautiful things above and roundabout them; and if they gradually grow
to feel that the whole world is nothing but muck, their power of usefulness is
gone. If the whole picture is painted black there remains no hue whereby to
single out the rascals for distinction from their fellows. Such painting finally
induces a kind of moral color-blindness; and people affected by it come to the
conclusion that no man is really black, and no man is really white, but they are
all gray. In other words, they neither believe in the truth of the attack, nor
in the honesty of the man who is attacked; they grow as suspicious of the
accusation as of the offense; it becomes well-nigh hopeless to stir them either
to wrath against wrong-doing or to enthusiasm for what is right; and such a
mental attitude in the public gives hope to every knave, and is the despair of
honest men.
To assail the great and admitted evils of our political and industrial life with
such crude and sweeping generalizations as to include decent men in the general
condemnation means the searing of the public conscience. There results a general
attitude either of cynical belief in and indifference to public corruption or
else of a distrustful inability to discriminate between the good and the bad.
Either attitude is fraught with untold damage to the country as a whole. The
fool who has not sense to discriminate between what is good and what is bad is
well-nigh as dangerous as the man who does discriminate and yet chooses the bad.
There is nothing more distressing to every good patriot, to every good American,
than the hard, scoffing spirit which treats the allegation of dishonesty in a
public man as a cause for laughter.
Such laughter is worse than the crackling of thorns under a pot, for it denotes
not merely the vacant mind, but the heart in which high emotions have been
choked before they could grow to fruition.
There is any amount of good in the world, and there never was a time when
loftier and more disinterested work for the betterment of mankind was being done
than now. The forces that tend for evil are great and terrible, but the forces
of truth and love and courage and honesty and generosity and sympathy are also
stronger than ever before. It is a foolish and timid, no less than a wicked,
thing to blink the fact that the forces of evil are strong, but it is even worse
to fail to take into account the strength of the forces that tell for good.
Hysterical sensationalism is the very poorest weapon wherewith to fight for
lasting righteousness. The men who with stern sobriety and truth assail the many
evils of our time, whether in the public press or in magazines, or in books, are
the leaders and allies of all engaged in the work for social and political
betterment. But if they give good reason for distrust of what they say, if they
chill the ardor of those who demand truth as a primary virtue, they thereby
betray the good cause, and play into the hands of the very men against whom they
are nominally at war.
In his "Ecclesiastical Polity" that fine old Elizabethan divine, Bishop Hooker,
wrote: "He that goeth about to persuade a multitude that they are not so well
governed as they ought to be, shall never want attentive and favorable hearers;
because they know the manifold defects whereunto every kind of regimen is
subject, but the secret lets and difficulties, which in public proceedings are
innumerable and inevitable, they have not ordinarily the judgment to consider."
This truth should be kept constantly in mind by every free people desiring to
preserve the sanity and poise indispensable to the permanent success of self-
government. Yet, on the other hand, it is vital not to permit this spirit to
sanity and self-command to degenerate into mere mental stagnation. Bad though a
state of hysterical excitement is, and evil though the results are which come
from the violent oscillations such excitement invariably produces, yet a sodden
acquiescence in evil is even worse.
At this moment we are passing through a period of great unrest-social,
political, and industrial unrest. It is of the utmost importance for our future
that this should prove to be not the unrest of mere rebelliousness against life,
of mere dissatisfaction with the inevitable inequality of conditions, but the
unrest of a resolute and eager ambition to secure the betterment of the
individual and the nation. So far as this movement of agitation throughout the
country takes the form of a fierce discontent with evil, of a determination to
punish the authors of evil, whether in industry or politics, the feeling is to
be heartily welcomed as a sign of healthy life.
If, on the other hand, it turns into a mere crusade of appetite against
appetite, of a contest between the brutal greed of the "have-nots" and the
brutal greed of the "haves," then it has no significance for good, but only for
evil. If it seeks to establish a line of cleavage, not along the line which
divides good men from bad, but along that other line, running at right angles
thereto, which divides those who are well off from those who are less well off,
then it will be fraught with immeasurable harm to the body politic.
We can no more and no less afford to condone evil in the man of capital than
evil in the man of no capital. The wealthy man who exults because there is a
failure of justice in the effort to bring some trust magnate to an account for
his misdeeds is as bad as, and no worse than, the so-called labor leader who
clamorously strives to excite a foul class feeling on behalf of some other labor
leader who is implicated in murder. One attitude is as bad as the other, and no
worse; in each case the accused is entitled to exact justice; and in neither
case is there need of action by others which can be construed into an expression
of sympathy for crime.
It is a prime necessity that if the present unrest is to result in permanent
good the emotion shall be translated into action, and that the action shall be
marked by honesty, sanity, and self-restraint. There is mighty little good in a
mere spasm of reform. The reform that counts is that which comes through steady,
continuous growth; violent emotionalism leads to exhaustion.
It is important to this people to grapple with the problems connected with the
amassing of enormous fortunes, and the use of those fortunes, both corporate and
individual, in business. We should discriminate in the sharpest way between
fortunes well-won and fortunes ill-won; between those gained as an incident to
performing great services to the community as a whole, and those gained in evil
fashion by keeping just within the limits of mere law-honesty.
Of course no amount of charity in spending such fortunes in any way compensates
for misconduct in making them. As a matter of personal conviction, and without
pretending to discuss the details or formulate the system, I feel that we shall
ultimately have to consider the adoption of some such scheme as that of a
progressive tax on all fortunes, beyond a certain amount either given in life or
devised or bequeathed upon death to any individual-a tax so framed as to put it
out of the power of the owner of one of these enormous fortunes to hand on more
than a certain amount to any one individual; the tax, of course, to be imposed
by the National and not the State Government.
Such taxation should, of course, be aimed merely at the inheritance or
transmission in their entirety of those fortunes swollen beyond all healthy
limits. Again, the National Government must in some form exercise supervision
over corporations engaged in interstate business-and all large corporations are
engaged in interstate business-whether by license or otherwise, so as to permit
us to deal with the far-reaching evils of overcapitalization.
This year we are making a beginning in the direction of serious effort to settle
some of these economic problems by the railway-rate legislation. Such
legislation, if so framed, as I am sure it will be, as to secure definite and
tangible results, will amount to something of itself; and it will amount to a
great deal more in so far as it is taken as a first step in the direction of a
policy of superintendence and control over corporate wealth engaged in
interstate commerce, this superintendence and control not to be exercised in a
spirit of malevolence toward the men who have created the wealth, but with the
firm purpose both to do justice to them and to see that they in their turn do
justice to the public at large.
The first requisite in the public servants who are to deal in this shape with
corporations, whether as legislators or as executives, is honesty. This honesty
can be no respecter of persons. There can be no such thing as unilateral
honesty. The danger is not really from corrupt corporations; it springs from the
corruption itself, whether exercised for or against corporations.
The eighth commandment reads: "Thou shalt not steal." It does not read: "Thou
shalt not steal from the rich man." It does not read: "Thou shalt not steal from
the poor man." It reads simply and plainly: "Thou shalt not steal."
No good whatever will come from that warped and mock morality which denounces
the misdeeds of men of wealth and forgets the misdeeds practiced at their
expense; which denounces bribery, but blinds itself to blackmail; which foams
with rage if a corporation secures favors by improper methods, and merely leers
with hideous mirth if the corporation is itself wronged. The only public servant
who can be trusted honestly to protect the rights of the public against the
misdeeds of a corporation is that public man who will just as surely protect the
corporation itself from wrongful aggression.
If a public man is willing to yield to popular clamor and do wrong to the men of
wealth or to rich corporations, it may be set down as certain that if the
opportunity comes he will secretly and furtively do wrong to the public in the
interest of a corporation.
But, in addition to honesty, we need sanity. No honesty will make public man
useful if that man is timid or foolish, if he is a hot-headed zealot or an
impracticable visionary.
As we strive for reform we find that it is not at all merely the case of a long
up-hill pull. On the contrary, there is almost as much of breeching work as of
collar work; to depend only on traces means that there will soon be a runaway
and an upset.
The men of wealth who today are trying to prevent the regulation and control of
their business in the interest of the public by the proper government
authorities will not succeed, in my judgment, in checking the progress of the
movement. But if they did succeed they would find that they had sown the wind
and would surely reap the whirlwind, for they would ultimately provoke the
violent excesses which accompany a reform coming by convulsion instead of by
steady and natural growth.
On the other hand, the wild preachers of unrest and discontent, the wild
agitators against the entire existing order, the men who act crookedly, whether
because of sinister design or from mere puzzle-headedness, the men who preach
destruction without proposing any substitute for what they intend to destroy, or
who propose a substitute which would be far worse than the existing evils-all
these men are the most dangerous opponents of real reform. If they get their way
they will lead the people into a deeper pit than any into which they could fall
under the present system. If they fail to get their way they will still do
incalculable harm by provoking the kind of reaction which, in its revolt against
the senseless evil of their teaching, would enthrone more securely than ever the
very evils which their misguided followers believe they are attacking.
More important then aught else is the development of the broadest sympathy of
man for man. The welfare of the wage-worker, the welfare of the tiller of the
soil, upon these depend the welfare of the entire country; their good is not to
be sought in pulling down others; but their good must be the prime object of all
our statesmanship.
Materially we must strive to secure a broader economic opportunity for all men,
so that each shall have a better chance to show the stuff of which he is made.
Spiritually and ethically we must strive to bring about clean living and right
thinking. We appreciate also that the things of the soul are immeasurably more
important.
The foundation-stone of national life is, and ever must be, the high individual
character of the average citizen.
- "The Man With the Muck-rake" by Theodore Roosevelt. April 14, 1906.
